Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy by Sophal Ear (review)

This book brings a subtle analysis to the scholarship on international aid, development, and governance in general and in Cambodia. Sophal Ear examines the effect of aid on governance using case studies on economic growth, the government and donors' response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), and human rights activism in this Southeast Asian kingdom.

Ear's arguments are persuasive. He begins by bringing some nuance to established research on the impact of aid on governance. Using data from 209 countries collected in 2005, he reports that, of six dimensions of governance — voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption — only the rule of law shows a clear negative impact from aid — particularly aid and technical cooperation. Aid helps marginally to improve voice and accountability but aid dependence cannot be used conclusively to explain variation in the other dimensions of governance. In other words, his conclusions are more tempered — international aid does affect governance negatively, but not as badly as previous research has reported.

To delve more deeply into the actual relationship between aid and governance at the country level, he presents findings from a survey of forty-three people who were asked for their opinions on the six dimensions of governance in Cambodia and how these have fared over time. The subjective assertions of the respondents were that the donor community effected positive change in political stability, voice and accountability, but failed to positively influence government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, or control of corruption. This substantiates Ear's broader quantitative analysis.

The phenomenon of growth without development is the substance of the second chapter. Ear examines the factors that have brought about uneven growth across three industries — garment, rice, and livestock. He finds little evidence that donors were actually the driving force behind this growth. Instead, he points to the convergence of distinct circumstances as providing the necessary conditions for growth (or lack thereof). In the garment industry, private sector organization (mostly foreign) and the exceptional relationship between this organized group and the Ministry of Commerce were highlighted as the driving forces behind the success of this sector. The other two sectors, due to historical precedent and the local and disparate nature of holders, are lacking in organization and social capital. Moreover, and more importantly, for Ear's thesis, the latter two sectors are based on the dividing or displacement of pre-existing rents rather than the creation of new opportunities. Consequently, the government has little incentive to attend to the constraints specific to these sectors because the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits. Thus, across the three sectors examined, Ear asserts that growth in the garment sector has not occurred because of the government's effort but despite it, while stagnation in the other two sectors is indicative of the lack of political will and poor governance on the whole.

The third chapter examines the international community's response to HPAI in Cambodia and criticizes it for overlooking the livelihood issues of the poor (who are directly affected by disease prevention policies) in preference for containing a potential global threat. Ear puts the blame squarely on the Cambodian government for not driving, coordinating, and overseeing the process and thus exacerbating the misalignment of national and international interests.

Ear's fourth chapter focuses on human rights activism and the international community's lack of resolve on democratic transformation. Using the arrests and subsequent release of activists in 2005 as an illustration, he notes that although this was an occasion where domestic and international NGOs came together and traditional networks expanded, the outcome was driven more by the government's opportune use of the situation, rather than by the force of civil society's demands. Civil society, which should function as a counterbalance to government, is sorely lacking in stable funding and suffers from conflicts in vision and power between national and international advocates. In fact, funding for Cambodian...